What confuses me about that whole alternative text on flickr issue is
that flickr is an edge case, not a typical use case for alternative
text. Images on flickr are not part of the content, they are the
content and there are some administration options (and a social
network) built around that content.
The flickr users do a lot to make their images accessible and describe
them. There are tags, thereÃ­s the description, the title, comments.
Each piece of information is worth nothing, neither to a search engine
nor to a screen reader software. But as a whole those informations can
drae quite a good picture of the image, quite frankly a better picture
than the most alt texts give in the web at the moment.
What we really need is imo not yet another sub use of the alt
attribute but a way to connect those informations to the image and
indicating that there is an image in the page even if the alt text is
not present.
IÃ­m a huge fan of <figure> and <legend> for these use cases.
I agree that it has to be our goal to make the web more accessible but
forcing users, many without a tech background, to enter an abstract
alternative text and a description is too much. Flickr has to depend
on their users to enter descriptions that make sense.
If flickr would out of the blue require description and/or alternative
text, one would find a lot of garbage descriptions there which is the
counter effect of what we want to achieve.
Eric Eggert
David Poehlman wrote:
>
> accessibility is right not privilige.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jon Barnett" <jonbarnett@gmail.com>
> To: "Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)" <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk>
> Cc: "Anne van Kesteren" <annevk@opera.com>; "David Poehlman"
> <david.poehlman@handsontechnologeyes.com>; "James Graham" <jg307@cam.ac.uk
> >;
> "Steven Faulkner" <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>; "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch
> >;
> "W3C WAI-XTECH" <wai-xtech@w3.org>; <public-html@w3.org>
> Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 1:12 PM
> Subject: Re: Flickr and alt
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 8:25 AM, Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)
> <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk>wrote:
>
>>
>> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> [...]I was trying to point out that Flickr cannot start requiring
>>> users to <perform some task> as that will simply kill their
>>> business.
>>>
>>
>> Exactly the same argument was adduced about requiring
>> public houses to require their customers to either
>> refrain from smoking completely, or to smoke outside.
>>
>> The pubs /didn't/ go out of business, and most of their
>> customers came to accept that -- by following the rules --
>> they were improving the environment for everybody.
>>
>> Philip TAYLOR
>>
>
>
> Forcing content on a user-generated content web site, by law, to
> meet a set
> of accessibility standards is asinine and frightening at the same
> time.
> There are plenty of countries that would never go for such a thing.
>
> Smoking laws are a poor analogy. A better analogy would be fining a
> restaurant for not forcing everyone in a restaurant to use sign
> language
> while they talk.
>
> There is absolutely NO chance I would ever upload 100 photos to a
> web site
> and write a sentence of text for each picture only to have that
> sentence be
> invisible to 99% of the public. If I'm going to write 100 sentences,
> they're going to be captions viewable alongside a photo and not
> alternate
> text for a photo. For this reason, I see Flickr as a silly use case
> for
> @alt as I can only ever foresee Flickr using this:
>
> <figure>
> <img src="image.jpg" whatever-markup-goes-here>
> <legend>My wife and myself in front of the Niagra Falls, a proper
> description of this image</legend>
> </figure>
>
> As this would be silly (it's redundant):
>
> <figure>
> <img src="image.jpg" alt="My wife and myself in front of the Niagra
> Falls, a
> proper description of this image">
> <legend>My wife and myself in front of the Niagra Falls, a proper
> description of this image</legend>
> </figure>
>
> And this would never happen:
>
> <figure>
> <img src="image.jpg" alt="Proper alternate text I'm going to write
> for 100
> images but is only presented when the image is not visible">
> <legend>My wife and myself in front of the Niagra Falls, a proper
> description of this image</legend>
> </figure>
>
> I'm also sure at least 50 of those images wouldn't get captioned at
> all
> because I simply don't have the time. If Flickr suddenly required
> me to
> caption all 50 of those images, I would just insert junk into the
> textbox
> for the caption or I would find a photo sharing site without such a
> silly
> requirement for me, as the user.
>
> --
> Jon Barnett
>